Only 2 did Tango in Rio for India
Vijay Anand
This
Rio Olympic, India appeared with the biggest contingent but could achieve fewer
medals than London. Sakshi Malik in 58 kg free style wrestling won lone bronze
for India. P V Sindhu became the first Indian women to win silver medal in
Olympics for India in women’s single badminton. Team returned with just 2
medals.
Hockey
hopes crashed at the QF. Under foreign coaches, Indian hockey has gone through
total transformation. Our team is scoring more than 75% goals from penalty
corner which was below 25% at the beginning of century. Team India could have done better but journey
end too soon. We can take pride that we defeated the champions (Argentina) at
group stage. Women team could earn a single point in 5 games to finish at
bottom of group.
In
athletics, 34 sportsmen/women participated in 19 discipline. Lalita Babar
became only the second track runner to qualify for the finals after P T Usha in
1984. After reducing her National record in the SF, he came 10th in
the final. Tintu Luka was unlucky to be drawn in tough heat group. Seema Punia
(Discuss throw), Vikas Gowda(Discuss throw), Ranjeet Maheshwari (Triple Jump),
Ankit Sharma (Long jump), Seema Antil (Discuss throw), Dutee Chand-Sarbani
Nanda (sprint) gave below par performance and went home at the earliest
possible stage. 4X400 meters relay men team was disqualified. Thonakal Gopi and
Kheta Ram achieved their personal best in marathon.
Saina
Nehwal lost match to much weaker Ukranian opponent due to injury. Srikanth
Kidambi played his heart out before going down to 2 time Olympic and 5 time
world champion Lin Dan. Doubles pair could not reach the knock out stage. In
boxing, India’s best medal hope took a dip when draw was made public. Shiv
Thapa, best hope, played his first game against eventual gold medal winner
Ramirez of Cuba.
There
were some near misses as well. Deepa Karmakar came 4th in Women’s
Vault. She is young and we’ll surely see better from her. Abhinav Bindra missed
medal in tie breaker of 10 met air rifle event. Sania- Bopanna lost in the
bronze medal match. Vikas bowed out in QF of men’s middle weight boxing. Kolkata’s Atanu Das came 5th in
men’s individual archery. Jitu Rai,
another hope, could reach only one final out of 2 and finished 8th
in 10m air pistol. Dattu Bhokanal came out 13 in men’s single skull and created
history by qualifying for the final. Satish Shivalingam came 11th in
77kg weightlifting. No male wrestler (including heavy favourite Yogeshwar Dutt)
was able to cross round of 16 in either category which is a point of worry.
Deepika
Kumari and whole archery team, Avtar Singh (Men’s 90 kg Judo), Gagan Narang (3
shooting events), Heena Sidhu- Gurpreet Singh-Chain Singh (2 shooting events
each) disappointed everyone. All table
tennis players bowed out in round 1.
It
was a game which heralded new chapter for India in women empowerment. Players
got maximum ink, beam and most importantly the eyeballs. There are a lot of
lessons to be learnt. It should be seen that medal tally of 15-30-19-64 of
Commonwealth games ‘14 and 11-10-36 -57 of Asian Games ’14 could fetch us only
2 medals. Though there is significant drop in medal count of all the powers but
in case of India, it is appalling. A lot of work is to be done. Infrastructure,
stadiums, picking and nurturing players from young age, tough competition in
the country by meets-leagues-tournaments etc, tough anti doping rules, good
coaches, cleaning of sport federations, facilities are some of the many areas
where we have to work really hard if we want a better tally at Tokyo. Sadly, blessings from famous tall statue of
Jesus fell on only 2 Indians. Tchau Rio.
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